We're far from done with the Oracle v. Google lawsuit. The search giant has responded to the lawsuit, and Miguel De Icaza has provided a very interesting insight into the case. His report has been confirmed by James Gosling, known as the father of Java who left Sun right after the merger. Icaza speculates that the potential to monetise on Java by suing Google was pitched by Jonathan Schwartz during Sun's sales talks with Oracle. Oh boy.

The reason why Java is so widespread is due to massive amounts of money Sun spent on developing/marketing the Java brand.

From a technical perspective, I personally think Java is too bloated and over-engineered. Java makes sense only to companies like Sun/Oracle that sell expensive hardware to satisfy Java's run-time overheads.

Ada is extensively used in safety-critical systems and is a very modern (compared to good old C) programming language. It is safe, fast and has support for object-oriented programming.

With the recent controversies around Java, I think people should at least give Ada a try. It is difficult not to like Ada, because it's well structured and supported robust software development principles.

The reason why Java is so widespread is due to massive amounts of money Sun spent on developing/marketing the Java brand.

By now, the reason why Java is so widespread is that it's a relatively safe language to program with a huge amount of libraries available for just about every scenario businesses might need.

That is, Lego for programmers. Just without the fun.

It's not about languages or execution models anymore, but about the availability of components that can be plugged together. Perl survives through CPAN for the same reason.
Where's such a thing for Ada?

You are just repeating what I wrote in my post. When Java first emerged it was slow and clunky. Sun poured huge amount of time and money, vastly improving Java compiler technology and adding tons of libraries. So much that you have people arguing how Java is faster than C/C++, etc.

Nevertheless, when it comes to safety critical systems, people are using Ada, and not Java real time, or whatever they call it.

Nothing is stopping you from implementing the required libraries in Ada, or any other language. Ada does not have as many libraries/packages as Java, because nobody owns or is trying to sell Ada brand. Businesses jumped on the Java bandwagon because they don't really care about the quality of software, but the quantity. Why is it that there are so many mediocre Java programmers? Because all they know is how to slap together Java's lego bricks. It's much easier to be a bricklayer, than an architect.

I don't claim to be an expert in Java or Ada, but I used them both, and in my opinion Ada is much better designed. When a programming language enforces automatic garbage collection and prevents you from using pointers explicitly, because programmers are too stupid to get it right, it really makes me wonder what type of people prefer using that language.